It's been a long time getting here -- the Mustang snapshots[2] started appearing here on java.net in late 2004, if I'm not mistaken -- but we're getting closer. Java SE 6 is now feature-complete and the first beta[3] has been released.

In contrast to the source and binary
snapshots[5] that we've been shipping for over a year, the formal beta release
has been through many weeks of intensive testing--and a tiny little bit of
last-minute bug-fixing--in order to produce a release that's somewhat more
polished. If you've chosen to avoid the riskier snapshot builds then now is
the perfect time to have a look at Mustang, make sure your existing code still
compiles and runs, and try out the new features. Please do
href="http://bugs.sun.com/services/bugreport/index.jsp">let us know what you
think or--even better--
href="http://mustang.dev.java.net/collaborate.html">get involved and help
us make Mustang a great release for the entire community!

In The NetBeans look-and-feel competition winners are...[8], Kirill Grouchnikov writes:
"Winners of NetBeans look-and-feel competition have been announced. Needless to say that I have been pleasantly surprised to see that 31 out of 33 winners have used the Substance module for NetBeans to create their entries."

In Also in
Java Today[9],
the dev2dev interview Kodo - Towards an Open-Source EJB 3.0 Persistence Engine[10] effectively breaks the news that BEA will open-source its Kodo EJB persistence product as "Open JPA". BEA Senior Directory Neelan Choksi says "Open JPA will include a significant portion of the Kodo code base that will be open sourced, specifically the Kodo kernel and the technical preview of the EJB 3 Persistence specification. Once the EJB 3 specification is approved, Open JPA will be an open source implementation of the EJB 3 Persistence standard under an Apache software license."

ONJava is featuring a second excerpt from Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland's Spring: A Developer's Notebook[11]. In a previous excerpt, they looked at iBATIS as one form of data persistence that could be integrated into a Spring application. In Using Spring with JDO and Hibernate[12], they move on to two popular O/R frameworks that further isolate your code from the underlying SQL, pointing out that "though it's nonstandard, you could say that behind EJB, Hibernate is the most popular persistence framework in the world."

The Projects and
Communities[13] section notes a
recent addition to the Mac Java Community[14]. The Quaqua Look and Feel[15] is "a user interface library for Java applications which wish to closely adhere to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X." It offers a nearly native user experience, adjusting its look to suit the version of Mac OS X (Tiger, Panther, or Jaguar) being run.

[Regression] Very slow accessors[17]:
"I'm having some difficulty narrowing down a serious performance regression in Mustang that I've come across recently. I took a look at an implementation of Knuth's dancing links algorithm. [...] On my WinXP laptop, the algorithm finds roughly 90,000 solutions per second in Java 5, and about 45,000 solutions per second in Mustang b71."

In "proven" libraries and what's in there?[18], sebastiankirsch reports a curious surprise:
"I just made some experiments with the hprof-feature of the JVM as we had some memory problems on our tomcat. There, I discovered a single object using 262152 bytes... after some analysis, I found this snippet of source code: private static final String[] PADDING = new String[Character.MAX_VALUE];I guess you find this as intriguing as I do. I don't want do discuss a solution or best practice here - my point is: this piece comes from StringUtils, from the well-known commons lang library (v2.1)."

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Mustang goes beta

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